


Out of the Cave

by Xx666Aughts_Username420xX



Category: Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Disappointment, F/M, M/M, Multi, enemy fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-20 19:17:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21061835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xx666Aughts_Username420xX/pseuds/Xx666Aughts_Username420xX
Summary: Dagny is losing faith in John Galt's whole "Atlantis" thing.





	Out of the Cave

“The ozone is nearly gone,” said John Galt. “That’s what Hobnob Jones’ weather balloon says, and it’s the finest weather balloon in existence,”--his patented oxygen mask muffled his voice--“well, the only weather balloon in existence. Can you believe he’s been asked to share his designs with people who want to replicate his weather experiments to see whether they hold up? As if the experiments of inferior minds unable to design their own weather balloons would ever come close to Hobnob’s and my brilliance!"

Dagny Taggart nodded, but she thought how odd it was that he attached himself to Hobnob’s invention, as if he had done more than provide the financial backing, as if everyone didn’t know that John had never set foot in the lab he set Hobnob Jones up in until the weather balloon was nearly finished, at which point he helped Hobnob weld some pieces together and then began acting as if he were an equal contributor to the endeavor. It struck Dagny as something a looter would do, though it pained her to think something so akin to slander against the man whose mind she respected, whom she had even loved for his inventiveness; although “love” seemed a trivial word unable to convey the import of such a mind, such a man as John Galt.

Love had always seemed like an oppressor holding its victims hostage to some imagined depth in the people they claimed to love, and Dagny’s respect for John could not assuage the impression that she had become such a hostage to him by her love or respect for him. It embarrassed her, like displaying the weaknesses she associated with her sex did more often now that she found herself thinking and saying things like “I feel…” or “I believe...” as if she could not control the world around her or did not know intimately how it worked in practise, unlike those who normally hid behind their beliefs--people like Jim. Dangy felt as ineffectual as a teenage girl without the drive to do anything her boyfriend disapproved of or even was mildly indifferent to.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, not particularly interested in whatever emotional responses she would conjure. Though she used to be so intellectual, she had grown accustomed to flights of “what ifs” and similar non-objective patterns of thought.

“This just isn’t how I expected it to be,” she said, making John regret asking even more strongly.

As he rolled his eyes behind his mask, a cloud of black smog wafted over his Gulch from Wyatt’s Torch. “Let’s get inside.”

Dagny watched through the grimy windows of her mask. She thought wistfully of a time when plumes of smoke from factories and train engines wafted across blue skies. If not for Rearden Metal, the color green might also have been lost to her.

They entered John’s house and waited for the foyer to pressurize before removing their masks and entering the living room.

“Do you remember how the air used to smell here?” she asked. “Fresh.”

“Dirty,” he corrected. “What’s fresher than filtered air?”

“It’s artificial air.”

“Exactly, do you think that snivelling Jim Taggart, or Wesley Mouch, or James Pritchett could have done anything like this? This is the work of a genius mind, something no looter could ever have replicated even given the exact instructions, as they no doubt would demand! Don’t tell me you regret taking our oath. Do you?”

“Not exactly.” She still believed that no man should live for another, but she thought that she felt that he was asking her to live for him, to live for the consequences of this utopia he’d wrought by destroying the world outside. He was destroying the world everywhere, not just the looters and whiners, but Galt’s Gulch, Atlantis, all of it--everything he created was dwindling, but he came up with new inventions to counteract them; to predict them he found one of the clarinet players, Hobnob Jones, who had been a meterologist that quit because his station, WMmK, would not allow him to build a seismograph which would detect earthquakes across the continent. Young Hobnob took up his hobby of clarinet until John Galt discovered him and placed him in Richard Halley’s orchestra during his time in Atlantis. Galt hired him to design and build a weather balloon to detect chances of acid rain, shifts in the ozone, levels of contaminants in the region, etc. It also scoured the continent for more habitable regions so citizens of Atlantis could plan work trips accordingly. Hobnob still played for Halley, though, and did weather reports in the mornings and tinkered with weather balloon designs until rehearsal.

This morning he predicted acid rain coming in the early evening, and the sky looked horrific, so Dagny imagined he was right again.

“If you don’t like the way our world is,” John Galt said, “you ought to do something about it, and stop complaining.”

“I have been doing something about it. I have been utilizing your generator in my trains to reduce the amount of smog I put into the air. You and Hank and Frisco, you all keep finding loopholes instead of fixing the problem.”

“Loopholes? You sound like them, so afraid of progress you need euphemisms to hide your true beliefs, or do you have any left? You’re happy enough to use my generator, my mask--”

“You’re happy enough using my pressurized cabin technology."

“Because I respected you.”

The past tense caused a tenseness in Dagny’s chest that she couldn’t name. She stood in the discomfort a moment before saying, without raising her voice, “Well, I’m not so sure I respect you anymore.” She drops the mask to the carpet where the dinge of the day stains the rug worth over $66,600. “I don’t think I like the world you created, with Frisco and Ragnar, and all of them. You found something so brilliant, a beacon of hope in this world, an ideal to strive for, but you chose destruction instead, without thinking what would happen if--if someone like Ellis Wyatt just lit an oil field alight and left it burning forever! ‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.’ Well, I have not asked you to live for me, John, but you have asked me to live for you, and this is how you repay me? Or am I to accept--frankly mechanical, though not in a charming way--sex in exchange for the sun assaulting my bare skin through the window of my train car? I have given up the smell of tar on a newly shingled house because I cannot breathe the air outside my house without one of your gas masks, for what in exchange?”

“Some days there are fewer carcinogens. Hobnob’s weather balloon suggests that tomorrow afternoon the air--”

“That is not the point! You have robbed me of my right to decide how to live.” As she spoke, she thought how dramatic she sounded, but she struggled to explain more rationally why she was so enraged at John. The rage felt irrational, but feeling, too, is irrational, so Dagny was at a loss, standing vulnerable and weak as a scarecrow filled with birdseed. “I cannot step foot outside my house without one of your inventions covering my face.”

“I never thought you would be so girlish to complain about an accessory.”

“You know that that is not what I’m concerned about. My choices are covered in your fingerprints. I cannot escape you! I cannot have a moment to myself without your imprinted upon it!”

Looking outside, Dagny saw that the acid rain had already begun in a drizzle. The odd feeling in her torso worsened, like she had swallowed a bunch of screws which were piercing her fragile flesh; she could imagine the acid rain on her skin like burns from a furnace. But she had left her car and would be damned to give Midas Mulligan a nickel for his tonight. She didn’t know why she blamed him, but she did. She wanted to be alone for a while and would have to walk in the rain to achieve that. She opened the door to the foyer, but John grabbed her arm.

“You can’t go out there."

“Let me make my own decisions.”

“No. Not until you’ve heard my announcement tonight. I promise you will change your mind; you will see what this has all been for.”

Dagny had forgotten about John’s Speech tonight. She ripped her arm from John’s grasp, and he let go a moment too late. The odd feeling in her stomach tightened. The screws only hit her insides with the flat sides now, but somehow the feeling was worse than before.

She felt less respect for John as she looked at him: his leather jacket covering his body like a condom against the world had large buckles at the neck where he fastened the bottom of his oxygen mask. He resembled a boxing dummy wearing goggles. No matter how much she respected--or once respected--his mind, it was hard to be sexually attracted to a boxing dummy. And trying struck Dagny as a betrayal of her own self-respect; if she no longer finds him worthy of respect, the relationship came into the realm of Hank’s awful marriage to that harpie Lillian!

Without his goggles, John looked dumber still, his metal green eyes stared dully at her waiting for her response. He’d placed her on this pedestal so long ago that she believed, though he did not necessarily need anything of her, he wanted her faith in him, just like damned Jim needed from her, just like Eddie Willers needed of her, John Galt needed her to want him, abstractly or actually, and she couldn’t do it anymore. She was exhausted, and not the kind of exhausted she felt after depriving herself of sleep to work through the night, but the kind of exhausted where she wished she could strike from Galt’s strike.

She sat with a hmph that surprised them both with its childishness.

“You’re being irrational, Dagny.” John sat down and creaked as he did. “This is a utopia where you are free to do anything, and yet you feel unfree? One of your premises is wrong. You are not happy because you think that I, who have given you this freedom, am taking it away?”

The tenseness was joined by a ringing sound in her ears, now. She could hardly hear what else John Galt had to justify himself, to deny her own intelligence, for she had heard all that she could stomach. She stood and said calmly, “I will be leaving this house. Do not try to prevent me.”

She fasted the neck strap of her own leather jacket and left John’s gas mask, deciding the pain of the rain and the air was fitting punishment for her foolish trust in him.  
After a couple months in their utopia of greed, Dagny and John took a trip to the place where Project X had been, where Dr Robert Stadler had blown up, and she thought about how one foolish decision can kill you when you try to grovel to the world for what you wanted back. If you were willing to give it up, you hardly had the right to complain that you were lacking. Driving back, they’d passed an abandoned Taggart train, and she’d insisted they stop.

A car pulled alongside her and disrupted her train of thought. Thinking it would be John, she nearly shouted at the driver who rolled down the window to speak to her, but she looked over and it was not John, but Frisisco D’Anconia, like a knight come to her aide.

“Need a lift? The weather is murder!” His smile almost put her off, but after a moment, she nodded and got into his car. He reached across her to manually roll up the window; he smelled like sweat and petroleum. “What were you thinking?” Frisco asked.

“That I needed some air,” she said bitterly.

“Ouch, I don’t think I’d like to be in John’s boots today!”

Dagny felt the pit of her stomach drop. She said nothing, and after a moment, Frisco said, “I meant nothing by it. You are--” he trailed off, but Dagny knew what he would have said. --the only woman I’ve ever loved. He had said as much to Dagny before, wistfully when John Galt proposed to her with a ring forged from a nail he’d lifted from Taggart rails that night they stopped on their way back to Galt’s Gulch…

“Sometimes I believe I should have pursued Eddie Willers,” she told Frisco, surprising herself by the revelation.

“Why?”

“He worshipped me, almost as much as he worshipped you. He had since we were kids. I would have done anything that you told me to, but he would have done anything for me.”

“Or me.”

Dagny nodded. “That is true.”

“Maybe I should have pursued Eddie!” Frisco laughed, then looked at her seriously, “John worships you, too. He built all of this for you, a woman worthy of all of this… you inspired every action of his.”

“I inspired every action of Eddie’s, too, but it was all in service of me. Oh, sometimes… you will think it’s irrational, nevermind. I’m sick of having my thoughts dismissed as irrational.”

“Hey, Slug, don’t sell yourself short. This isn’t the place for that bullshit. Atlantis is about the freedom to be prideful.”

“But I think that I am selling myself short! I am living my life for John Galt. I am, and it disgusts me to say what I’m about to, so you mustn’t tell anyone, not even Hank and especially not John!”

“Of course I won’t. What is it?” He already felt disgusted by her words, but he knew that, for the sake of his love for Dagny and John in equal amounts, he must listen and keep this promise.

“I think that I am John’s Eddie Willers!” As soon as she had said it, she felt that she could not keep down the feeling in her stomach any longer, but it erupted out of her like a gas leak from her eyes; she cried and cried and could not stop crying as much as she told herself that she was being stupid and acting like a woman--it kept streaming out of her even stronger as she reminded herself of this. What she had just said was so embarrassing that she couldn’t cease her weeping, even as she saw the unease that twisted Frisco’s sculpted face. “Oh, how pathetic is that? But it’s true! I am his lapdog, just as Eddie was mine, and the thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.” She said, “I worship him and receive nothing in return! I have destroyed myself for him, have accepted this version of the world for him, but I never knew that this is what his vision would culminate in!”

“But did Eddie ever...inspire you?” he was reaching for things John had praised about Dagny years ago when he worked on her railroad, but anything more recent eluded him and he had a funny feeling in his chest as he watched this woman whom he had loved show such weakness and sorrow. “You always inspired John…” the words fell flat. Frisco struggled to believe his own words. He could not remember the last time that John had cited his respect for Dagny, his need to impress her and build a world worthy of her, as a motivation for his work. His attention had turned entirely to Project H, which he would announce to Atlantis tonight, and Frisco--damn his own mind!--he thought that Project H also would fail Dagny, and that John would continue to fail Dagny because he had perhaps never known what she believed or respected. He had misinterpreted Nat Taggart’s legacy, and Frisco had never seen this, nor had Dagny, until tonight, and the revelation pained both of them so they tried to escape it and hold onto their respect for Atlas, for the Destroyer, for John Galt.

Dagny sniffled and said, “Oh hell… who is John Galt?”

After a moment, Frisco answered, “He is who you always knew him to be… he is the Destroyer.” He wanted to apologize, but he had nothing to apologize for. If anything, she should have apologized for loving John over him. They rode in silence until they rolled up to Dagny’s house, and Frisco asked whether he could join her in a drink before the announcement, but she denied him and walked into the house alone. It felt sterile, more sterile than usual, and cold. The pressurized foyer blew cold air on her bare face.

*

When it comes time to attend the speech, Dagny took her own car to the ampitheatre, and she occupied a seat by the door so she may leave quickly. There was an empty seat on stage which she believed John intended for her and left present and unoccupied in an attempt to shame her for abandoning his side. Beside the empty seat sat Hobnob Jones. His floppy hair falls in his face when he moves his head, so he fixed it throughout the speech, whenever he tilted his head and laughed at one of John’s stiff jokes.

He spoke for nearly an hour, saying nothing of consequence, hammering home the doctrine of his philosophy in the form of premises and arguments that they have all heard before.

The audience’s rapt attention caused Dagny’s chest to tighten. She sits with her arms folded over her breasts. Her body exuded cool disinterest, and the man sitting beside her shivers visibly after glancing at her in the middle of John’s speech.

At last, John arrived at the point of his speech: “I am joined today by Hobnob Jones, whom you may all recognize as the first chair clarinet in our orchestra, but he is here because he is also a genius meteorologist…”

Of course, the audience knows this because they have also heard his weather forecasts. Still, their attention did not wane, not even a snicker rose in the auditorium. If Dagny were herself a lesser woman, she might have laughed derisively and loudly enough for it to reach John’s ears and cause him distress, but she sat stoically still, listening raptly, thinking, Win me back, John. Take back what is yours.

“Together, we have designed and have nearly finished building something better than you can imagine! Our combined minds have brought to fruition this!” He clicked a button so an image became plastered across the curtains behind them: a half-built device which looked like a bigger version of the weather balloon, with tubing attached to its bottom which resembled sprinklers. “The Hobnob Hoser!"

A round of applause rose throughout the room, but Dagny did not cheer, unsure of what they were all looking at. “What is it?” she said to the man beside her, who stood in ovation.

“I’m not sure, but that John Galt never fails, does he? He’s got a mind, hasn’t he? And that Hobnob, what an innovator, and at such a young age! I hope I’m as innovative as he is! But, I guess I’m here, so I must be, mustn’t I?”

Dagny thought his waffling reminded her of Wesley Mouch.

“You see, these are the hoses--” John stood beneath the photograph and gestured the sprinklers. “They rain chemicals down to affect the makeup of the planet, to create more greenery, which produces oxygen, which we very much need now that Mr. Wily Cahoots has decimated the Amazon in pursuit of lumber, which has been a lucrative endeavor, to be sure, but I digress. I told you not to let me digress, Hobby!”

They both laughed and were joined by a small percentage of the audience. Wily Cahoots feared his business model would be questioned, as he hasn’t actually sold any lumber in almost a year and has yet been prolonging the cut in order to keep his head lumberjack from pursuing his true interest in engineering.

None of this was on John Galt’s mind, however, and he continued to explain how the terraforming balloon would work.

“And the best part of it? We’re not wasting time on this planet. No, we’ll slowly transport the resources from our dying planet to Mars! Or as I like to call it: Olympus!”

Dagny rose and left the auditorium, but heard him announcing as if pleading, “My beautiful wife Dagny will be designing the Spacetrain, as we’re calling the freight rocket we’ll use to transport supplies, including the Hobnob Hoser.”

Unlike Eddie when asked to carry her purse, Dagny did not intend to leap at this bone John threw her. It did not come close to hitting her as she walked to her car, inhaling unhealthy helpings of the Earth’s atmosphere.

John would have to grovel.


End file.
